Between the usual ad blitz for beer, fast food and soda, one Super Bowl spot this Sunday will carry a stark warning about the food Americans eat.
“We’re the most powerful country in the world, and we have the most obese, fudgy people,” the boxer Mike Tyson says. He also says he was once “fat and nasty” and ate “a quart of ice cream every hour.” Mr. Tyson says in the ad that his sister died at 25 “of obesity,” after having a heart attack. The words “Processed food kills” and “Eat real food” flash as Mr. Tyson and his son bite into apples.
The ad was paid for by MAHA Center, a new advocacy group aligned with the Make America Healthy Again movement. The group is led by Tony Lyons, a close ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a key figure in the MAHA movement who also leads its political fund-raising arm. He said that the center raised money for the Super Bowl ad by reaching out to “billionaires” and other donors, whom he declined to name.
“We made the argument that this was a historical turning point that they should want to be part of,” he said, saying the group wanted an ad campaign to rival those of major companies like Coke or Pepsi.
The segment ends by pointing viewers to RealFood.gov, a government website that highlights dietary guidelines released last month that overhauled the food pyramid, putting steak, cheese and whole milk near the top, and encouraged people to avoid processed foods.
Mr. Kennedy has long demonized ultraprocessed foods as a key driver of disease in America. They include certain frozen meals, salty snacks, cereals and many other products. Mounting evidence has tied these kinds of foods to diabetes, obesity, heart disease and a range of other chronic conditions.
Even as Mr. Kennedy’s attacks on childhood vaccines have raised condemnation and alarm, his messaging about food has proved popular with voters on both sides of the aisle. An October poll from the nonprofit research group KFF and The Washington Post found that a vast majority of parents considered highly processed food a major threat to children’s health, regardless of whether they saw themselves as aligned with the MAHA movement.
In a post on X on Friday, Mr. Kennedy called the ad “the most important message in Super Bowl history.” Mr. Lyons said the ad push, which also includes “Processed food kills” signs on taxicabs in cities across the country, aims to encourage people to change how they eat.
“That’s the best, most important decision that you can make,” Mr. Lyons said.
Mr. Tyson’s lines are brutally critical of fatness. He describes himself as having weighed 345 pounds and as having “so much self-hate” that he wanted to kill himself.
That kind of shaming of weight and food choices can be counterproductive, said Lindsey Smith Taillie, an associate professor of nutrition at the U.N.C. Gillings School of Global Public Health, and may lead to more unhealthy behaviors. “It certainly isn’t an effective strategy for promoting better eating, individual shame,” she said.
But Mr. Lyons said that the “dramatic” nature of the ad underscored its message. He said he believed the American people had been misled about ultraprocessed foods. “It’s not anyone’s fault,” he added. “People have been lied to, and the system has been rigged. People have gotten addicted, and it’s a drug like any other.”
Nutrition researchers have broadly recommended that people consume fewer ultraprocessed products and eat more whole foods. Some research suggests that ultraprocessed foods are potentially addictive in nature, compelling people to eat more and more.
“The industry and its political allies will quickly point to personal responsibility as the main issue — why aren’t people just pushing away from the table and eating differently?” said Kelly Brownell, a professor emeritus at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. But when ultraprocessed foods are “engineered to hijack biology,” he said, “then the personal-responsibility argument falls apart.”
The ad also focuses on individual choice, ignoring the challenges that many Americans face in buying and preparing their food. Grocery prices are rising. The Trump administration has placed restrictions on food assistance programs. Processed foods are cheap, convenient and aggressively marketed. They are also widely available: Roughly 70 percent of the American food supply consists of ultraprocessed foods.
“You want to target the root causes of why people are eating these foods to begin with,” Dr. Smith Taillie said. “And it’s not because Americans are somehow lazier and weaker than all these other countries. It’s because we have a uniquely unhealthy food environment.”
Avoiding all processed foods is “just not realistic in today’s environment,” said Brenda Davy, a professor of nutrition at Virginia Tech.
“It will get people’s attention, but will they just tune it out?” she said. “Because they don’t really know how they can make that work with their life.”
Dani Blum is a health reporter for The Times.
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